This is characteristic, and that is why I record it. People who observe flowers, and do not only buy them, will not be astonished that when this happened most—this severe review and condemnation—it was orchids, orchids only, that were in question. And this for several reasons. Some are beautiful, but some are ugly, almost morbid indeed—things for the delectation of Des Esseintes, the too neurotic hero of M. Huysman’s À Rebours; scarcely for healthy folk, whom mere strangeness may not fascinate. And then again, the extreme intricacy of the forms of some of them, tells in two ways against their employment as subjects for a painter. It is not only—it is not so much—that their intricacy adds to the difficulty of correctness; it is rather that it adds to the difficulty of their comprehension by the spectator of the draughtsman’s drawing. The public knows the rose and the geranium—it knows, besides, two score of flowers of English garden and hedgerow. But the intricacy of the orchid is as yet an unfamiliar intricacy, and it is infinitely various; and therefore, though the painting of the orchid in Francis James’s water-colours was an experiment interesting and courageous, and within reasonable limits successful, that work was but one phase—far from the most important—of a career and of a talent full already of individuality, distinction, charm.
(Studio, January 1898.)
THE END
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